Top 50 Ina Garten Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Anyone who tries to make brownies without butter should be arrested.”

— Ina Garten

2. “You can be miserable before you have a cookie and you can be miserable after you eat a cookie but you can’t be miserable while you are eating a cookie.”

— Ina Garten

3. “Cooking is one of the great gifts you can give to those you love. It says “you’re important enough to me to spend the time and effort to cook for you.”

— Ina Garten

4. “When I thought my professional career was over, it hadn’t even started yet.”

— Ina Garten

5. “I time everything. I’m a scientist at heart.”

— Ina Garten

6. “Food is not about impressing people. It’s about making them feel comfortable.”

— Ina Garten

7. “Grilled cheese and tomato soup is the ultimate comfort meal.”

— Ina Garten

8. “Creme Brulee is the ultimate ‘guy’ dessert. Make it and he’ll follow you anywhere.”

— Ina Garten

9. “I get up every day, do the best that I can do, and go home and have a good time.”

— Ina Garten

10. “You don’t have to do everything from scratch. Nobody wants to make puff pastry!”

— Ina Garten

11. “I like almonds as a snack – keeps your energy up but doesn’t fill you up.”

— Ina Garten

12. “When I wrote ‘Barefoot in Paris,’ I wanted to make simple recipes that you could make at home that tasted like French classics.”

— Ina Garten

13. “In the summer you want fresh, light and sort of quick things; in winter you want things that are comforting, so your body really tells you you want to go towards potatoes, apples, fennel, things that are warm and comforting. And loin of pork.”

— Ina Garten

14. “Never let ’em see you sweat. Guests feel guilty if they think you’ve worked too hard to make dinner for them – which of course you have!”

— Ina Garten

15. “I always like to have flowers on the table. I think they make it look special.”

— Ina Garten

16. “One of the great gifts that you can give people is to cook for them.”

— Ina Garten

17. “Food is about nurturing: not only physical but also emotional nurturing.”

— Ina Garten

18. “All my life I dreamed of an apartment in Paris where I could cook, and now I have one, on the Left Bank.”

— Ina Garten

19. “My favorite fall or winter lunch is big steaming bowls of soup. I usually invite people for around 12:30 and have two hearty soups like shrimp corn chowder and lentil sausage soup, which can be made a day or two ahead.”

— Ina Garten

20. “Instead of going out to dinner, buy good food. Cooking at home shows such affection. In a bad economy, it’s more important to make yourself feel good.”

— Ina Garten

21. “If it’s a cocktail party, I generally make five or six different things, and I try to choose recipes that feel like a meal: a chicken thing, a fish or shrimp thing, maybe two vegetable things, and I think it’s fun to end the cocktail party with a sweet thing.”

— Ina Garten

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22. “I always have music. I love it to be very upbeat. When you’re having drinks, I like something like Cesaria Evora. During dinner, I like the much more traditional – old Frank Sinatra and things like that.”

— Ina Garten

23. “My extravagance is my garden – it’s the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.”

— Ina Garten

24. “My mother would never let me in the kitchen. I always wanted to cook, but I was never allowed to. Her view of the world was, ‘Cooking is my job, and studying is your job.’ I think, in retrospect, she didn’t like the chaos. She was very orderly. It had to be her way.”

— Ina Garten

25. “I’m really a scientist. I follow recipes exactly – until I decide not to. And then I’ll follow something else exactly. I may decide I could turn this peach tart into a plum tart, but if I’m following a recipe, I follow it exactly.”

— Ina Garten

26. “I try to greet my friends with a drink in my hand, a warm smile on my face, and great music in the background, because that’s what gets a dinner party off to a fun start.”

— Ina Garten

Featured in: Fun Quotes

27. “I’d like to think that when I invite friends to my house, they know what I’m really saying is, “I love you; come for dinner.”

— Ina Garten

28. “I’ve taught myself how to use good, fresh ingredients and to prepare them as simply as possible by cooking only to enhance their intrinsic flavors.”

— Ina Garten

29. “The most important thing for having a party is that the hostess is having fun. I’m very organized. I make a plan for absolutely everything. I never have anything that has to be cooked while the guests are there. The only thing I might have to do is take something out of the oven and carve it.”

— Ina Garten

Featured in: Fun Quotes

30. “It’s so important that you don’t put the stuffing in the bird, where in order for the stuffing to get cooked you have to overcook the turkey. It’s better to do it on the side.”

— Ina Garten

31. “The most overrated tool: a pasta maker. Why make it when you can buy it? It’s a lot of work!”

— Ina Garten

32. “The dirty little secret is that I grew up in a household where there were no carbohydrates allowed, ever. No cookies, no bread, no potatoes, no rice. My mother was very extreme in terms of what she served. Since I left home more than 40 years ago, I’ve been making it right for myself.”

— Ina Garten

33. “Fun is the most important. If you do stuff for money, it never works out.”

— Ina Garten

Featured in: Fun Quotes

34. “It doesn’t really matter what the occasion is – big or small – but it’s the connections that we have with people we love that nourish our souls. Entertaining isn’t just about making dinner parties. It’s about celebrating those connections and I think that’s what makes life worth living.”

— Ina Garten

35. “I absolutely adore Thanksgiving. It’s the only holiday I insist on making myself.”

— Ina Garten

36. “I’ve lived in the Hamptons since 1978, when I first bought my store Barefoot Contessa.”

— Ina Garten

37. “People have more fun if they don’t eat so much they have to be taken home in an ambulance.”

— Ina Garten

Featured in: Fun Quotes

38. “The thing about all my food is that everything is a remembered flavor. Maybe it’s something I had as a child or maybe it’s something I had in Milan, but I want it to taste better than you ever thought.”

— Ina Garten

39. “Every once in a while, a cookbook comes along that simply knocks me out.”

— Ina Garten

40. “Take one flower that you like and get lots of them. And don’t try to ‘arrange’ them. It’s surprisingly hard to do a flower arrangement the way a florist does one. Instead, bunch them all together or put them in a series of small vases all down the table.”

— Ina Garten

41. “I actually think that the food our mothers made may not be what we are nostalgic for. It’s more an emotional picture of a mother who was always there, knew what we needed, loved us, let us run free when we wanted to explore.”

— Ina Garten

42. “I use other cookbooks for inspiration. I must say I tend to cook from my own cookbooks for parties.”

— Ina Garten

43. “They say that gardens look better when they are created by loving gardeners rather than by landscapers, because the garden is more tended to and cared for. The same thing goes for cooking. I only cook for people I love.”

— Ina Garten

44. “If you think about a Thanksgiving dinner, it’s really like making a large chicken.”

— Ina Garten

45. “I love to take something ordinary and make it really special.”

— Ina Garten

46. “A good home should gather you up in its arms like a warm cashmere blanket, soothe your hurt feelings, and prepare you to go back out into that big bad world tomorrow all ready to fight the dragons.”

— Ina Garten

47. “I measure everything, because I always think that if I’ve spent so much time making sure this recipe was exactly the way I want it, why would I want to throw things into a pot?”

— Ina Garten

48. “The planning is everything. Deciding which dishes you’re going to prepare can turn into the make-or-break decision five days later, when you actually serve the meal.”

— Ina Garten

49. “I think the best shortcut is to choose really simple recipes. Because I think you can make simple recipes that are as delicious as complicated ones.”

— Ina Garten

50. “I love Alton Brown’s show ‘Good Eats,’ about the chemistry of food. It’s really thoughtful.”

— Ina Garten